Two conferences in two European cities. Two attempted bans (though only one successful). Two different responses from politicians and the media. All of which tells us something about the state of free speech today.
Last Tuesday, Emir Kir, a mayor in Brussels, created international headlines when he tried to ban a National Conservative conference in the city. The attempt failed, denounced as “unacceptable” by the Belgian prime minister, Alexander de Croo, and ruled unlawful by the top administrative court.
Five days earlier, with far less comment or condemnation, Berlin police forcibly shut down a conference on Palestine. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, rector of Glasgow University, and a reconstructive surgeon who was due to talk of his experiences in Gazan hospitals, was prohibited from entering Germany. The former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, now secretary-general of the leftwing DiEM25 movement, was served with a betätigungsverbot, a ban on any political activity in Germany, including participation by video from another country.
Speakers at the NatCon conference denounced the role of the “liberal elite” and the EU in trying to silence them. It was, in fact, the act of a maverick mayor who had been expelled from the Socialist party because of his links with Turkish far-right politicians. In contrast, the Berlin conference was shuttered with the full force of the state. Yet, no prime minister condemned the action, and few in the mainstream media criticised it.
The issue of free speech is commonly viewed as a left-right issue: the left as supportive of censorship, the right as “free-speech warriors”. That, though, is to take conservative myth-making at face value. Certainly, the left’s historic commitment to free speech has been eroded in recent years. The right’s hostility to censorship has, though, rarely been more than hypocritical.
Nigel Farage, who had been speaking as the police turned up at the NatCon conference, was interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s PM programme. He was asked about Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s censorious policies. Orbán’s hostility to immigration, liberalism and the EU has turned him into a political hero within NatCon circles. What of Orbán’s authoritarian polices that have undermined both press and academic freedom? Such policies, Farage insisted, had nothing to do with censorship. Rather, Orbán’s aim was to “shut down a global millionaire, George Soros, indoctrinating kids. That’s different”.
If my ideological soulmate imposes censorship, it is to protect people. If my ideological foe does the same, it is an assault on free speech.
Kir had used two justifications in his attempt to ban the NatCon conference: that the public needed to be “safe” and that the conference was a “far-right” gathering. Both the use of “safety” as validation for censorship, and the stretching of labels as a way of targeting political opponents, have become central to contemporary “cancel culture”. While these are often pushed by the left, the right is as deft (in many cases, defter) in exploiting them.
The wave of “anti-woke” legislation sweeping Republican states in America, including bans on “unacceptable” views in universities and corporations, is often justified in protectionist terms. In many such states, teachers are prohibited from introducing material that might make “any individual feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex”. Earlier this month, an appeals court ruled it unconstitutional for Florida, through its “individual freedom law”, the state’s so-called “anti-woke” legislation, to outlaw “ideas designated as offensive”. A Florida judge observed of the law, that it “bans professors from expressing disfavored viewpoints… while permitting unfettered expression of the opposite viewpoints”. In their survey of US campus cancel culture The Cancelling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott observe that “Ironically, the right and the left have traded places when it comes to imposing… campus speech codes”.
The right, though, has always been censorious. What has changed is that the left has provided conservatives with new weapons with which to pursue their censoriousness. The right has gleefully adopted the language of safety and offence to pursue its ideological ends while simultaneously denouncing the left’s use of these as “woke”.
Take current attempts to suppress pro-Palestinian speech. From university campuses to social media, academics, artists and writers have been sacked or silenced for supporting Palestinian rights or criticising Israel.
Describing a case in which Columbia University students were asked to remove Palestinian flag emojis from their names during Zoom meetings because these “caused trauma reactions”, the academic and writer Natasha Lennard observed that this might sound like “the stuff of far-right parody: an absurd example of ‘woke’ culture”. Yet, “safety” has become “the latest weapon… to silence criticism of Israel”. “People are taking their feelings of being uncomfortable with information as the same as physically being unsafe”, one student observed. This conflation has been enabled by many on the left themselves eroding, in Lennard’s words, the distinction “between feeling safe and being safe”.
And just as many on the left have stretched the meaning of “far right” to target opponents, many on the right (and liberals, too) have expanded the meaning of antisemitism to target critics of Israel. And nowhere more so than in Germany. One reason that the actual closure of a conference in Berlin drew less outrage than the failed attempt to ban one in Brussels is that censorship of Palestinian voices has become unexceptional.
It is not just pro-Palestinian voices, though, whose rights can be eroded in the name of protecting the public. A Metropolitan police officer recently told Gideon Falter, of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, that as an “openly Jewish” person he could not approach a pro-Palestinian march – even though most such marches include a visible Jewish bloc. The Met apologised but, in its initial statement, added that people like Falter must know that “their presence is provocative” and a threat to “public safety”. The Met was then forced to apologise for its apology. It is difficult to think of a more textbook definition of antisemitism than for a Jew to be told that he cannot be visibly Jewish for fear of causing upset.
We need to push back against attempts to censor political speech and criticism under the guise of “protecting the public”. We also need to recognise the way that the left has provided the right with weapons with which to target progressive causes. It is always those fighting for social change who are most harmed by the imposition of censorship.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
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